The HLT Interview: with Crazy Rob
HLT: Well, it’s a great pleasure for us to get to finally talk to you Dr Robin. Our pants are wet as we speak. Could you just recap as to why you teach English language?
Dr Robin: They have my family. If I don’t do what they say, they’ll hurt them. They tell my family the same thing; if they don’t do what they want, I’ll be hurt. I get a lot of complaints from students. I understand my wife’s keeping her legs together. They have my car as well. They’ll smash it up if I don’t accept wage slavery – or even if I do. It’s a game they’re playing with us as hostages. There’s really no quid pro quo. They rape my wife and cut my fingers off. They
call it ‘torturing a couple to death’. Then they explain it to themselves by saying I didn’t teach the past participle properly.
HLT: Do you?
Dr Robin: I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. My needs are basic. I won’t leave the wardrobe I’ve been given to sleep in except to teach. Please don’t hurt me again. I’ll be good. Is there a bathroom here? Does it have a window?
HLT: Why are they doing this to you?
Dr Robin: I’m the victim of an evil gang of smug homosexuals who don’t want me to be with a woman. The women are too frightened to even be seen with me so now I have to do it with goats. They film us together and show it to my captured wife. It’s tough on us both.
HLT: You’re joking with us Dr Robin! This is one of your spoofs! Come now. You get paid well for what you do, don’t you?
Dr Robin: They have a time machine. In the future I was a rich and succesful actress (in inverted commas); but they travelled to the year 2091 (that me was born in 2070) and murdered me for my billions and had unconsensual sex with my children. Afterwards they went back to 2070 and took my mother back in time to 1961 where they altered my chromosomes and I was born as a language teacher under the sign of Arachnea. It isn’t the first time either.
HLT: You wouldn’t recommend ELT as a career then?
Dr Robin: It’s just a gang bang. Teachers think they’ve got it tough here in the UK with screening for child molesters. Imagine being the lowest common denominator in a child sex ring being passed from one filthy gang of paedophiles to another. That’s what it’s like being a lanaguage teacher overseas. There’s no protection. They don’t wear a condom. The UK Parliament doesn’t care. Being trained in TEFL on a government training scheme and sent abroad to work is just a euphemism. I was transported for stealing a bar of chocolate; much like those nineteenth century criminals who stole air from aristocrats by breathing and escaped prison by agreeing to colonise Australia.
HLT: A bar of chocolate?
Dr Robin: When I was once fifteen I put a Cadbury’s flake in my pocket without paying in a sweet shop and was apprehended by the proprietor who, spotting a passing policeman, called him in: and so it was that I found myself being arrested and cautioned by my own dischuffed father. The transporters are patient though. My first cell was Hungary. I was 34 and a virgin. But I’ve been ‘Pretty Boy Robin’ on the Wing now for the best part of two decades. ‘Gerund!
Gerund’ big Karoly would mumble as he thrust his way into my soon apathetic rectum while holding a copy of Time for English open on my back.
HLT: You taught English in prison?
Dr Robin: Well, to be accurate, I’m a prison slave. Obviously there’s the law; even in civilized countries. So the students who’re raping my children and smashing up my car are in prison. Because it’s my children that are being torture-raped and my car they’re smashing up, I understand that I’m a prison slave. It’s a simple matter of deduction really. I’m not Dr Phil. I’m balder and fatter for one thing. Of course he can get an erection. He’s allowed to. But I know he’d complain if I had one. Men are like that. For them it’s all about deflating others. Like Karoly in Hungary. He got it up while I couldn’t. Prototypical male behaviour.
HlT: Would you like your own talk show?
Dr Robin: No, I’d just like to sit in a chair with a camera on and tell the truth about it all.
HLT: The truth?
Dr Robin: Yes, I’ve been around for a long time. Knowing something about structuralism helps one to understand. Structuralists look at reality as a room in which there’s furniture; some of it will always be there, some of it has always been there, and some of it has disappeared. Another analogy is film. Imagine reality as a film and this is the version you’re in now; but there have been other versions. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, there’s a women’s University, the
Bint Nour, and there was a time when they used to breed blonde Applegates there: Christina
Applegate (1971-) from the US sitcom Married With Children (1987-97) – in which she played teenage Calipornian airhead Kelly Bundy – is the best known example today. I asked them one time if I could have an Applegate or two? ‘What for?’ they wanted to know. Well, if you’ve ever seen Christina Applegate as Kelly, you’d know. But it was explained to me that they were bred for being edible. They were eating Applegates. Cooking Applegates too. They used to release them into the streets for the people to knock ‘em over the head and drag ‘em off to
barbecue. Or make Mom’s Applegate pie.
HLT: We don’t believe you.
Dr Robin: Okay, I’m ambivalent about credulity. I have a student who patiently explains to me that jeans are singular. It doesn’t matter what the English language says; for him it’s ‘a jeans’. He’s decided, and it wasn’t a tough decision. A lot of them decide never to use the ‘s’ on the end of the verb for the third person singular. They believe otherwise you see. Some people believe in the automobile, others in flying carpets. I know which camp I’m in.
HLT: You believe in flying carpets?
Dr Robin: They’re eco-friendly.
HLT: What advice would you give to budding ELT professionals.
Dr Robin: Don’t bud. It’s more fun being a prisoner than a prison slave. Screw the teachers. I’m screwed. I know my place.
HLT. Isn’t that just a tad overly pessimistic?
Dr Robin: They have a time machine. I marry, I father children. They murder me and leave my widow and burgeoning adolescents grieving. Then I find myself growing up in an earlier period of my life with a passport that says I’m single and never have been married. So, officially, my children don’t exist and they’re sold into paedophile rings or eaten. My wife hasn’t a leg to stand on. According to the records she’s never been married either you see. Wave goodbye
to the kids honey, they don’t really exist.
HLT: But that’s horrible. If true.
Dr Robin: Imagine meeting a woman you know you were married to before you were murdered. What do you say? Hi Hon, I saw the kids the other day in Jello Tots. Perhaps she’s been murdered too, but they’re allowing her 1983 version to develop, having ‘pruned’ her in 2015. Consequently she doesn’t know you from Adam – or the kids. When I was a boy I lived in two houses in the same street in Bridlington, #12 (firstly) and #3 (secondly) Ashville Street. It was convenient for the child-abusing time-travellers. They’d abuse me at #3 and smile at me at #12; or they’d abuse me at #12 and smile me on at #3. Paedophiles like that. I was like a shuttlecock. Would I ever escape? If I lost my life at #12 I’d be back at Primary school in Pocklington, North Yorkshire. If I lost my life at #3 I’d be back at #12 and might never escape into a future beyond #3. Sometimes I’d see myself playing up the street while I awaited the latest paedophile prank. One Christmas they cut mine and my sister’s hands off so we couldn’t open our presents. They’d seen us in the future perfect you see, and we had hands. It was a game for them. They’d see me in a physically perfect future riding my bike and I’d take my hands off the handlebars: ‘Look! No hands!’ I’d say. The laughter was screeching. Paedophiles are like that.
HLT: How did you get your hands back?
Dr Robin: I woke up with them again one morning – and an erection. Happy New Year.
HLT: A nightmare?
Dr Robin: We believe what we must.
HLT: But because of all this you’ve learned to express yourself using the past tense?
Dr Robin: TEFL training is very thorough. I didn’t think it was important until I saw one of our Phillipino teachers write ‘It is yesterday.’ on the board. Using grammar like that you’d have to be writing a science fiction story.
HLT: So we should take what you say with a pinch of salt; is that what you’re saying?
Dr Robin: If it helps you swallow. I write scifi and I’ve written time travel stories.
HLT: It must be difficult going from place to place, teaching English language with all this going on in your noggin.
Dr Robin: Why do you think you’re an English language teacher? Because you have something they want so you have to get in circulation. My genes are good. Christina Applegate is famous for her appearances in Playboy. We might say her genes are blue. I have blue genes too. The children I produce from my loins are blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful. Who wants to eat ugly people? That’s why they like me to get around. Get married, have children, be murdered – and start again. It’s the Prussian method. I learnt it at school. The teachers used to tear up our work – even if it was good – and make us do it again. Learning by